Mischievous Creatures

“An affecting, admirably nuanced portrait of two lives fully dedicated to the pursuit of science.”

“A fascinating portrait of 19th-century science in the United States from a little-considered perspective.”

“With deep insight into the gendered power dynamics that shaped the first half of the 19th century, McNeur serves up an incisive study of institutional bias. It’s a vital account.”

“An important contribution to the history of women in science.”

“With detailed research and excellent writing, McNeur has thoughtfully provided a place in history for the sisters that had previously been denied them.”

“A welcome addition to intellectual history that restores two gifted women to the scholarly record.”

“Catherine McNeur’s meticulous research and sensitive storytelling are exactly what the Morris sisters deserve. She brings their painstaking and painfully underestimated work on ferns and flies, seaweeds, and cicadas to life—and also offers an illuminating case study of the omissions, misattributions, and erasures that have kept female scientists like them hidden for centuries.”

“By excavating the long-forgotten story of the remarkable Morris sisters, McNeur opens a valuable window onto the history of how scientific knowledge is created—and by whom. One will never think of dandelions, cicadas, or science itself the same way after reading this important and beautifully written book.”

“Mischievous Creatures recaptures the fascinating world of two sister scientists in brilliant detail. The Morris’s lab was their garden, where their unsung work changed the science of their time.”

“In McNeur’s expert narration, a co-biography of sister naturalists in nineteenth-century Philadelphia becomes an excavation of power structures underlying science and history. A triumph of investigative research and artful writing.”

“McNeur is a brilliant historian and a gifted writer. Mischievous Creatures is intensely beautiful, deeply humane, and filled with astonishing insights. It will change the way you think about science, the gendered production and reproduction of knowledge, and the workings of the world around you.”

“What did it mean for a woman to pursue a life in science in the decades before the Civil War? In this elegant and insightful book, McNeur recovers the lives and scientific labors of entomologist Margaretta Hare Morris and botanist Elizabeth Carrington Morris—the wheat flies, cicadas, beetles, ferns, and forget-me-nots that fascinated them; the curiosity that drove them; and the family, friends, and colleagues who sustained them. With stunning work in the archives, McNeur moves the Morris sisters from the margins to the center of the story and changes the way we think about the history of antebellum American science.”